How often did one actually look at strangers on the street?
Wait. The faceless woman was making a beeline for another Other. The woman with the garish makeup, cat eyes and claws. The cat woman was staring into a shop window, the faceless woman staring down at her phone.
I wasn’t the only one who saw it happening. Three sets of goblin eyes peered out from darkness, watching. Two Others, pretending not to see one another, a game of chicken, of all things. Seeing who would move first.
I had to almost press myself against the display window of the store to see the Duchamps further down the street. One was holding something, but the other held her wrist, stopping her from acting.
I contemplated breaking a window, but I wasn’t sure if it would make things worse.
The scene was still, except for the faceless woman, continuing her walk, boots hard on the sidewalk. Snow blew around her, but the wind wasn’t strong enough to reveal her face.
On the far side of the street, a woman and her male friend walked with coffees in hand, oblivious. Jacob’s Bell residents, going by the style of dress. Not ugly or cheap, but… small town more than Toronto.
The faceless woman drew closer, not veering.
The cat woman flexed her claws.
The door of one store opened, and I saw light stretch and cover different ground as the glass of the door caught and reflected it, expanding my mirror domain.
A man stepped out onto the street. Vaguely familiar looking, he practically tackled the faceless woman. Arm thrown around her shoulder, he intercepted her and used forward momentum to steer her way.
The cat woman turned, smirking, before she left, turning in the opposite direction.
The guy and the faceless woman drew closer to me.
They stopped right in front of the window I was residing within.
They didn’t talk.
I didn’t move, out of concern that they would somehow identify me.
“Such a hassle,” the man said, removing his arm from the faceless woman’s shoulders. She shrugged her way free, jabbing her cigarette in his general direction as he backed off. She looked nice, if a little plain, with a hat, scarf, and long jacket. He looked painfully average, though very thin and rather rumpled. His voice was almost a drawl, not accented so much as very fatigued. It was the perfectly wrong voice for him to say, “Don’t get pissy now. You’re the one that keeps trying to make a point.”
The faceless woman backed off. Her left hand dropped to her side. The phone wasn’t on, or even functional. The screen had a spiderweb of cracks radiating across it, and it looked a few generations old. She still held one arm up perpetually, cigarette between two fingers.
“If you’d done anything, she’d have gutted you,” he said.
The faceless woman turned his way, incredulity clear in her body language.
“She would have. I hate to break it to you, darling, but circumstances have changed. You might have held third or fourth place as one of the scarier free locals before, but I would be very surprised if you were one of the top twenty-five right now.”
The faceless woman turned and started pacing.
The man sighed. His mumble of a voice was so quiet I was surprised she could even hear him. “We have the disadvantage and the advantage of being new. That thing? That’s an old thing. Don’t let appearances deceive. If I had to guess, going by what little I’ve been able to pick up, I’d think that woman was a harbinger of Bast or a Lamia or something in that vein. Maybe demonspawn. What do you think?”
The woman didn’t react, still pacing. Prowling, even.
There was a pause before the man spoke again. “Powerful, smart, willing to play by the rules. Pick two, or be prepared to have a very short existence, understand?”
She turned his way for a moment, before she resumed pacing. She tried to go still for a moment, but after a short period of tapping her foot, tapping one finger on her cigarette, she started moving again.
The interplay between the two was fascinating, on a level. He did the talking, while she emoted. It wasn’t the same sort of coordination that happened with Faerie, honed over centuries of keeping one another’s company. It was very natural, very easy, and almost enviable.
He spoke like he was very tired. “Wait a little bit longer, and there’ll be enough chaos and bloodshed for all of us,” he commented. “It’s not the most noble thing, but we’ll be able to make our way around the battlefields and take our pick of the leavings. How does that suit you, being a scavenger bird?”
The faceless woman turned at the far end of the street, paused, and tapped on her cigarette a few times. Ash fell, but the cigarette didn’t grow shorter.
“What a shame,” the mumbling man said, “I’d hoped to have a conversation partner, but it looks like I’m the lone speaker in this group of mutes.”
I startled at that.
“You were talking to me,” I said, as it dawned on me.
“Oh, you do talk,” he said, managing to avoid any trace of sardony or condescension in his tone.
“I, uh, to belatedly answer your question, I don’t really see myself as a scavenger bird at all.”
“Was I overstepping?” he asked. “You never know, with you types. There’s so often a theme with your kind, but sometimes that theme is something you embrace, and sometimes it’s a sore point. Sometimes both.”
I was a little too off balance to properly wrap my head around the conversation. Rather than keep mumbling and struggling through, I tried to pull back and get my head in order.
“No,” I said. “Birds aren’t a sore point. A theme? Maybe, but it was more accidental than anything.”
“Then I won’t make a point of it. I recognize you. From the Thorburn house?”
“Yeah?” I answered.
“I delivered the pizza,” he said.
Ah. My mind flashed back to that scene. Goblins had impaled him on the fence, and the faceless woman had taken his face, all in an attempt to bait me outside. I hadn’t fallen for it, and he’d mocked me after the fact.
I ventured, “Can I ask what you are?”
“I don’t know so much, not really. I died, and I kicked and screamed so much that they wouldn’t take me,” he said.
The wan smile and relaxed attitude he offered me did not look like the expression of someone who’d clawed their way back from the afterlife.
“A revenant,” I said.
“Oh? A label. Good word, too. Better than being a wibbabog or boggart or banderscratch or momo or whatever name some of us wind up with. It’s like the practitioners who think up the names are giving the job to their children, instead of doing it themselves.”
“That’s more international influences than silliness,” I said.
“Eh,” he said. A pause. “Are you safe to look at?”
“Yeah,” I said.
He turned around, giving me a more thorough look. “You came from the same place as her?”
I glanced at the faceless woman. She’d stopped pacing, though she still fidgeted. She held her hand straight up, fingers splayed, but for the two that held the cigarette, and grabbed her arm at the base.
“Forest?” the quiet man asked.
“No,” I said.
“Same general place, then,” he said, and the words were barely comprehensible.
“I suppose,” I said.